


P. Todd, Destroyer of Worlds

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Cold War, Espionage, Foley Effects, Gen, Post-Canon, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 06:02:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2840720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two spies meet in a Soho café.</p><p>*</p><p>Advisory: allusions to homophobic persecution, mentions of imprisonment and capital punishment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	P. Todd, Destroyer of Worlds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cyphomandra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyphomandra/gifts).



Robert Anquetil peered over the gingham half-curtain and through condensation onto Dean Street: _STRIPTEASE_. Books and Magazines. The French House. Terrazza. What did that filthy crim Palmer always say? _In London with a beautiful girl? You must show her to Mario at the Tratt._ Anquetil considered himself no authority on feminine pulchritude, but he very much doubted that the operative he knew only as Blenheim Orange was beautiful—he realised he had _preconceptions_ , which the best part of twenty years in this line should have told him was folly, if only because they were so likely to be realised that you’d miss something else, something crucial. He examined them and found that they were of a pale, stringy-haired, bespectacled creature, like—like Ida Cross. Ida Cross, three miles away to the north, in Holloway. 

The bell over the café door rang to admit a young man in a black roll-neck sweater and tight twill slacks. Robert looked quickly down at his cold coffee and the _Mirror_ , folded with the comic strip facing outwards, the latter his invariable identifier. He was under no illusions about why that was, and felt no shame for it. Jane had married her Georgie Porgie at last and settled to a life of gay domesticity, far from the depredations of Lola Pagola. The strips were all different now: cruder, and so somehow less vulgar. He picked at some nameless, impacted gunge on the checked plastic tablecloth.

Ida Cross, twelve years into a life sentence. The same frantic subterfuge that had preserved Lewis’s memory from one last disgrace had probably helped to secure clemency for her. On the Sunday afternoon of that crowded weekend, Robert had anticipated the team sent to search Lewis’s room at Dartmouth by a bare hour, dropped a few high-sounding names in the right ears and carried away letters, photographs and magazines in official grey file-boxes. Robbie's own letters, after a few schoolboy fervidities, had always been discreet, but there were bound to be others. And indeed, what Lewis had seen fit to keep in a schoolmaster’s study-bedroom startled even the man who had a claim to have known him best in the world. It was a flimsy claim on very little, anyway. No-one really knew Lewis. What incriminating material resided in other hands Robbie could do little about, but he had suspected at the time it was scanty, and been proved right. Not because Lewis had been careful, but because he had been so very careless—careless of friendship, affection, of _love_ , responding to amorous, faithful or newsy budgets with a line on a postcard or a telephone call. He made up for it—good Christ, and _how_ —in the flesh. Robbie let out a shuddering breath.  The relative absence of written evidence had allowed Ida’s defence to argue that she had been the dupe of a seducer—and she, who valued life as Lewis despised it, had played the part consummately. Life unfree at the expense of dignity—well, Robbie couldn’t say that in her place he’d have done any different. _I ask and cannot answer_ , he muttered, _if otherwise wish I_.

‘Mr Sackville?’

Robbie jumped. Lost to recollection, he had not even noticed the silent approach of a plump, stylishly-dressed young woman. He smiled at his earlier reflections, supposing she would be thought very pretty, if not quite _beautiful_. She was in fact wearing spectacles, but the delicate gold frames lent small, finely-moulded features that might otherwise seem improbably juvenile a faintly cerebral air. Her hair was thick, fairish and arranged in a kind of cottage loaf on the top of her head. The green silk blouse revealed by the removal of her coat suited her clear pink-and-white complexion admirably. But what struck him mostly vividly was her air of almost uncanny calm: had he not also sensed that she was observing, registering, memorising every detail of the scene and conversation, he would have ventured to say _stolid_. 

‘Ah—yes. Do sit down,’ he said superfluously, since she had already occupied the seat opposite him. ‘Would you like coffee?’ He signalled to the waiter.

‘Thanks. Black, please.’

‘We can ditch the—er—now we’re working for the same—or supposed to be: they don’t call it the Circus because there’s a man with a waxed moustache and top-hat in charge, if you see what I mean—I’m Anquetil, anyway.’

‘Pomona. Pomona Todd.’ 

‘Good God. You have some German, I suppose? Give or take a bit of vowel quality, that’s really quite extraordinary.’

‘From Man’s First Disobedience to All Our Woe, you mean?  It _has_ occurred to me: I never dared ask if it was deliberate. I think not, it's bit too mordant. Mother was—artistic.’

‘Not—it couldn’t be—’

‘Imelda Todd? Well, yes, as it happens.’

‘But she was— _important_. I saw the retrospective in St Ives last year. I had no idea. I mean—I know ten years ago people thought a great deal of what’s-his-name—Keith—but when the histories come to be written—’

‘So they say. To me she was just Mother. Corrupting the village one Dionysian pageant at a time.’

‘Dionysian—but how absolutely _ghastly_. I mean, Christ—I’m sorry.’

‘Oh, don’t be. I miss her dreadfully, but no-one misses the tableaux. I was an Infant Bacchante from the time I could toddle, perched on the pard-drawn cart of a dreary solicitor—leading light of the Methodist chapel—who just happened to have the right sort of tubby, dissipated look. And then she went all Pre-Raphaelite and cast me as Eve in her Modern Mysteries. By then I’d been at school a term or two, and I did it as a creaky-voiced apprentice—sort of Francis Flute, you know. I didn’t get asked again.’

Pomona smiled over her coffee-cup, a little bent fencing-foil of a smile, with the whippy spring of something really rather dangerous about to be let go. Robbie grinned back, for some reason thinking of Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita. He had the feeling that his future contained occasions on which he would be glad to have Pomona Todd on his side. It only remained to work out which, where or what that side was.

**Author's Note:**

> My thanks to [AJHall](http://archiveofourown.org/users/AJHall/pseuds/AJHall) for pointing out during the [Trennels](http://trennels.livejournal.com/103554.html?thread=1633666#t1633666) discussion of _The Marlows and the Traitor_ that Nicola's discovery of the _Mirror_ comic strip at Mariners indicates that Lewis Foley enjoys slumming with [Jane](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_%28comic_strip%29). And to the same for [Mrs Todd 'corrupting the village' with her pageantry](http://archiveofourown.org/comments/10084085).


End file.
